The Bondboy Part 8

Next day a more startling thing happened. Twice each week there pa.s.sed through the country, from farm to farm, a butcher's wagon from Shelbyville, the county-seat, a few miles away. Isom Chase never had been a customer of the fresh meat purveyor, and the traveling merchant, knowing from the old man's notoriety that he never could expect him to become one, did not waste time in stopping at his house. His surprise was almost apoplectic when Isom stopped him and bought a soup-bone, and it almost became fatal when the order was made a standing one. It was such a remarkable event that the meat man told about it at every stop.

It went round the country like the news of a wedding or a death.

Isom seemed to be satisfied with the new dietary regulations, for hams were cheap that summer, anyhow, and the season was late. Besides that, the more that Joe ate the harder he worked. It seemed a kind of spontaneous effort on the lad's part, as if it was necessary to burn up the energy in surplus of the demand of his growing bone and muscle.

Ollie had picked up and brightened under the influence of ham and milk also, although it was all a foolish yielding to appet.i.te, as Isom very well knew. He had beaten that weakness in himself to death with the club of abstinence; for himself he could live happily on what he had been accustomed to eating for thirty years and more. But as long as the investment of ham and milk paid interest in kitchen as well as field, Isom was grudgingly willing to see them consumed.

Ollie's brightening was only physical. In her heart she was as gloomily hopeless as before. After his first flash of fire she had not found much comfort or hope of comradeship in the boy, Joe Newbolt. He was so respectful in her presence, and so bashful, it seemed, that it almost made her uncomfortable to have him around.

Man that he was in stature, he appeared no more than a timid boy in understanding, and her little advances of friendliness, her little appeals for sympathy, all glanced from the unconscious armor of his youthful innocence and reserve. She was forced to put him down after many weeks as merely stupid, and she sighed when she saw the hope of comradeship in her hard lot fade out and give way to a feeling bordering upon contempt.

On Sunday evenings, after he came back from visiting his mother, Ollie frequently saw Joe reading the little brown Bible which he had carried with him when he came. She had taken it up one day while making Joe's bed. It brought back to her the recollection of her Sunday-school days, when she was all giggles and frills; but there was no a.s.sociation of religious training to respond to its appeal. She wondered what Joe saw in it as she put it back on the box beside his bed.

It chanced that she met Joe the next morning after she had made that short incursion between the brown covers of his book, as she was returning from the well and he was setting out for the hog-lot between two pails of sour swill. He stood out of the path to let her pa.s.s without stepping into the long, dewy gra.s.s. She put her bucket down with a gasp of weariness, and looked up into his eyes with a smile.

The buckets were heavy in Joe's hands; he stood them down, meeting her friendly advances with one of his rare smiles, which came as seldom to his face, thought she, as a hummingbird to the honeysuckle on the kitchen porch.

"Whew, this is going to be a scorcher!" said she.

"I believe it is," he agreed.

From the opposite sides of the path their eyes met. Both smiled again, and felt better for it.

"My, but you're a mighty religious boy, aren't you?" she asked suddenly.

"Religious?" said he, looking at her in serious surprise.

She nodded girlishly. The sun, long slanting through the cherry-trees, fell on her hair, loosely gathered up after her sleep, one free strand on her cheek.

"No, I'm not religious."

"Well, you read the Bible all the time."

"Oh, well!" said he, stooping as if to lift his pails.

"Why?" she wanted to know.

Joe straightened his long back without his pails. Beyond the orchard the hogs were clamoring shrilly for their morning draught; from the barn there came the sound of Isom's voice, speaking harshly to the beasts.

"Well, because I like it, for one thing," said he, "and because it's the only book I've got here, for another."

"My, I think it's awful slow!" said she.

"Do you?" he inquired, as if interested in her likes and dislikes at last.

"I'd think you'd like other books better--detective stories and that kind," she ventured. "Didn't you ever read any other book?"

"Some few," he replied, a reflection as of amus.e.m.e.nt in his eyes, which she thought made them look old and understanding and wise. "But I've always read the Bible. It's one of the books that never seems to get old to you."

"Did you ever read _True as Steel_?"

"No, I never did."

"Or _Tempest and Sunshine_?"

He shook his head.

"Oh-h," said she, fairly lifting herself by the long breath which she drew, like the inhalation of a pleasant recollection, "you don't know what you've missed! They are lovely!"

"Well, maybe I'd like them, too."

He stooped again, and this time came up with his pails.

"I'm glad you're not religious, anyhow," she sighed, as if heaving a trouble off her heart.

"Are you?" he asked, turning to her wonderingly.

"Yes; religious people are so glum," she explained. "I never saw one of them laugh."

"There are some that way," said Joe. "They seem to be afraid they'll go to h.e.l.l if they let the Almighty hear them laugh. Mother used to be that way when she first got _her_ religion, but she's outgrowing it now."

"The preachers used to scare me to death," she declared. "If I could hear some comfortable religion I might take up with it, but it seems to me that everybody's so sad after they get it. I don't know why."

Joe put down the pails again. Early as the day was, it was hot, and he was sweating. He pushed his hat back from his forehead. It was like lifting a shadow from his serious young face. She smiled.

"A person generally gets the kind of religion that he hears preached,"

said he, "and most of it you hear is kind of heavy, like bread without rising. I've never seen a laughing preacher yet."

"There must be some, though," she reflected.

"I hope so," said Joe.

"I'm _glad_ you're not full of that kind of religion," said she. "For a long time I thought you were."

"You did? Why?"

"Oh, because--" said she.

Her cheek was toward him; he saw that it was red, like the first tint of a cherry. She s.n.a.t.c.hed up her bucket then and sped along the path.

Joe walked on a little way, stopped, turned, and looked after her. He saw the flick of her skirt as her nimble heels flew up the three steps of the kitchen porch, and he wondered why she was glad that he was not religious, and why she had gone away like that, so fast. The pigs were clamoring, shriller, louder. It was no hour for a youth who had not yet wetted his feet in manhood's stream to stand looking after a pair of heels and try to figure out a thing like that.

As Joe had said, he was not religious, according to catechisms and creeds. He could not have qualified in the least exacting of the many faiths. All the religion that he had was of his own making, for his mother's was altogether too ferocious in its punishments and too dun and foggy in its rewards for him.

He read the Bible, and he believed most of it. There was as much religion, said he, in the Commandments as a man needed; a man could get on with that much very well. Beyond that he did not trouble.

He read the adventures of David and the lamentations of Jeremiah, and the lofty exhortations of Isaiah for the sonority of the phrasing, the poetry and beauty. For he had not been sated by many tales nor blunted by many books. If he could manage to live according to the Commandments, he sometimes told his mother, he would not feel uneasy over a better way to die.

But he was not giving this matter much thought as he emptied the swill-pails to the chortling hogs. He was thinking about the red in Ollie's cheeks, like the breast of a bright bird seen through the leaves, and of her quick flight up the path. It was a new Ollie that he had discovered that morning, one unknown and unspoken to before that day. But why had her face grown red that way, he wondered? Why had she run away?